UH Mānoa's William S. Richardson School of Law, in conjunction with the Academy for Creative Media and the Federal Bar Association-Hawaiʻi Chapter, is proud to present a showing of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today on Friday, September 9, 2011 in Classroom 2 at the Law School.

The film screening will begin at 4:00 p.m. with a discussion to follow, featuring Sandra Schulberg, producer of the restored film and daughter of its original director, Siegfried Ramler, Nuremberg Trial Interpreter & Author and Yuma Totani, Associate Professor in the History Department and author of Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II. Admission is free. Refreshments, courtesy of the Academy for Creative Media, will also be available after the screening, first come, first served.

Written and directed in 1948 by Stuart Schulberg, Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today was commissioned by the U.S. War Department to ensure documentation of what many regard as the most famous significant courtroom drama in modern times. Although the film was viewed widely in Germany, and became an important element in the U.S. military’s denazification campaign, it remained almost unknown in the U.S. As documented in a recently unearthed letter signed by the U.S. Secretary of the Army, this was due to the Army’s desire to keep the film out of North American theaters for political reasons. According to a 1949 Washington Post investigation of this controversial decision, government officials thought it necessary to “forget the Nazis and concentrate on the Reds.”

More than 60 years later, Sandra Schulberg and Josh Waletzky meticulously restored the 35 mm film, and screened it for the first time in American theaters last year. Says Sandra Schulberg, “The suppression of Nuremberg left a big hole in the historical record. But I hope Americans will see it now in the context of today. Not to focus so much on what the Nazis did, but on what Americans can do to support the International Criminal Court and to encourage our Senate to ratify it.” Noting that Germany did not join the coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003, she adds, “I believe the German people have learned the lessons of Nuremberg better than any other nation in the world, and have taken the Nuremberg principles to heart.”